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• More than just gold missing from the Royal Canadian Mint :: Some silver, platinum and palladium, and a box of Bic pens are also missing.
• This is a lot of fun.  If you haven’t seen the floating cabins on Powell River, you will want to check out the blog for Powell River Books.  Of course having a floating cabin makes gardening quite difficult, unless you go and build yourself a floating garden.
• MSNBC has a list of 50 books you need to read now.  Newsweek has a list of the top 100 books you need to read that has been compiled by looking at everyone else’s lists.
• Joe Biden reminds us that he misread how bad the economy was.  Of course that makes people wonder if the stimulus is going to help or just bankrupt the United States eventually.
• No surprise here, patents held by Chevron are holding back electric and hybrid cars :: If NiMH batteries are being used so successfully, why are American manufacturers fixated on Li Ion batteries? Part of the reason is that petroleum company Chevron owns the patent for the Ovonics NiMH traction battery. Under the ruse of saying they have not had sufficiently convincing proposals brought to them, Chevron continues to deny licenses to any company proposing to manufacture new NiMH traction batteries. Equally aggravating is Chevron’s having filed suit against Toyota in 2003 after Chevron had acquired the Ovonics patent. Part of the settlement reached in this suit enjoined Toyota-Panasonic from manufacturing any additional EV-95 batteries. So every RAV4 EV on the road today (about 320 in private hands and an unknown number of fleet use) is running on its original NiMH battery pack. There were some NiMH battery companies “grandfathered in” at the time of the Chevron/Toyota settlement, but their products are either too small to use in place of the EV-95 or they are inferior in performance.
• Even Karl Rove can’t make sense of Sarah Pallin’s latest move
• KFC has a logo that can be seen from space, therefore capturing the large “I’m hungry but using Google Earth market”
• Gordon Brown is an idiot :: He says that you can’t have another Rwanda because of Twitter.  That explains why the world is doing nothing about Darfur and ignored the massive media coverage of Rwanda when it happened.
• Donations were way down to the Salvation Army as a sign of weakening economic conditions across western Canada :: Nationally, the Salvation Army reported that it has raised $2.47 million, considerably short of its $3-million goal for 2009.

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